Make A Strip Panel: Strip Search Challenge

In the very first Elimination episode of Strip Search, I ask my co-conspirator Gabriel if we are even capable of performing in the way we ask contestants to during the challenge. I asked it partially because I thought it might be a good line, which you might be able to triangulate from my wholly manufactured “high gravitas” tone, but also as a real question, because the methods we use to determine who is best - when hiring, or for the show - are incredibly intimidating. And I can tell you, just from my own perspective, it’s very strange when you build a company staffed by such competent people that you probably couldn’t get hired there.

In any case, I think we were as curious as anybody if we could do it. Apparently, we can. Robert and Josh went through the audience and solicited short topics from people, and here’s what we drew from our hastily assembled Wastebasket Of Broken Dreams (“ideas which were, perhaps, before their time”):

That’s if you had any questions about the content and, indeed, the nature of today’s offering. In typical “make a strip” style, audience requests were entertained: a man had waited in line to try and commemorate a friend no longer with us, and so we thought this strip might not necessarily be a good choice, be he says that she would have thought this was pretty funny and who are we to judge. There is also a double-sided Hot Dog Fairy for good measure. Robert thought it might be funny if we re-enacted the strip for our panel on Sunday, but it hadn’t occurred to me until I was on stage with three or four pounds of pink silicone incredibly near my mouth that many “members” of the audience probably weren’t familiar with the bit. I can’t imagine their response, which may have been similar to your own! Hopefully I have provided a sufficiently soft context for it to land here.

The Strip Search panel at PAX, speaking of which, is probably going to end up on a list of 2013 highlights in my diary if I ever get a diary and make a list like that. Certainly we like the show. But watching the latest ep with other people showed me that this is true for others as well. And we also had eight of the twelve artists there on the panel to answer questions and generally be cool, which was great. It was also quite clear that they don’t know what to think of us, which makes total sense: we put them into a terrible machine we had invented and ground them up until they became a uniform paste. We’re still agents of that horrifying device. But we love them - we have seen them every day, or most days, since the show came to a close. We watch episodes to find edits, and then watch them again when they come out, even though we were fucking there! So I can understand if they don’t want to be our friends, absolutely. It’s their right. But we’re big fans.

I met Max Temkin; I made up the show’s Swear Word, “dick-brie,” which is an artisinal smegma. I had a chance to catch up with one of the Ridiculous Fishing guys. I played Fiasco, finally. I had many opportunities to talk about my daughter Ronia. True to our Kickstarter, I cosplayed as the Fruit Fucker in a genuinely impressive suit, and then loaned this suit to Cliff Bleszinski, who took it on a tour of the Exhibition Hall. If you saw anything untoward down there, it wasn’t me. I also traded a fuckload of pins.

Omegathon Rounds are always bedeviled with technical problems; at Prime, we had to stop a Dance Central round live on stage - a stage we had literally done exactly the same game at before! - and move the whole apparatus to another venue altogether. Strange, undefined “rays” are usually to blame, hostile projections from elsewhere or even elsewhen. In that case, we tweeted the location and an impromptus dance party was born in a previously empty room. That is the spirit of the Attendee; whenever someone says that this is the best show, I agree, but I don’t take credit for it. PAX is something you bring, as I have said before. But even that resolve was tested when our final round - Spaceteam, one of our favorite games - was plagued by connection-chewing Spacerats which made the tournament setup (a setup we had rigorously tested/was hosted on a completely dedicated network/rested on a completely clean portion of the spectrum) utterly unworkable. We pushed through as long as we could, until both teams had truly tested themselves against the dangers of Space, until we felt we had presumed upon the patience of the audience and of our valiant Omeganauts too much. After burning through three of our four rounds, the last one simply wasn’t happening. But if the purpose of the Omegathon is to determine champion material, to ascertain the percentage of a given player’s stern stuff, the last four of thirty-two players absolutely meet the criteria. We’re sending them all to Germany - Deductive Kitty, Paintcan, Kexaron, and Tangentia, the first woman to stand astride the Omegathon stage and seize victory.